Monthly Archives: July 2007

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Toady details have won … the big picture had little room. Today has been very busy and getting things done that need doing .. I am thrilled to be busy … So I was ready for some *fun* tonight in a painting! What do you see?

Sue made a suggestion of showing some AWE window pictures – great idea … let’s see how tomorrow goes. Lots of last minute details getting ready for the biug events this week. Quite a lot of progess we have made!

You guys have pushed me over the edge to do different things and this is coming out … who IS this person? Although I am concerned that I may need to change my slogan and whole business plan and orientation, actually I am pretty excited about these last several digital paintings I have done. I am having mucho fun playing!Â Are these uplifting at all?

Who knows – these may be the images that some licensing company want to produce. That would be an irony – no? Sigh … “they” say that you are supposed to choose a style and stick with it to succeed. But I like to do different things – even if it means I am not as financially successful. Maybe posthumously my daughter will get rich from my work – that’s good enough. Or maybe they will all go in the trash heap!

Needed to work today on paperwork – you know the offline kind – physical paper and pen – remember the old days? Also, trying to get things finalized for the AWE (Artist Window Exhibit) that is happening this week and formalized for the next and hopefully periodic AWE’s that will be coming up. It has all been fun – and a lot of work!

Tomorrow I am hoping to make a decision about whether to set up a pro shop at CafePress. I so prefer to keep things low-budget .. but sometimes I think one just has to spring for things. I think this might be one of those times. I will let you know.

Thank you for stopping by and/or reading … hope your summer (winter in the southern hemisphere) is going extremely well!

I have been having so much fun playing with Studio Artist! But I decided I.better use a different base image to keep you interested. This is from the “Water and Earth” shown in this post here. These colors still aren’t my usual colors I tend to paint in (but they are somewhat closer than the colors I have been using) … but I think it is good I am stretching myself. Also you have all been part of my making more complex digital paintings and I think that is a really good thing. It also feels great to be thinking of names each time I create a painting rather than a daunting task of coming up with lots of names at once.

Last night and today I worked on setting up 2 CafePress shops. I think I am going to have to go to the pro version to make marketing these shops manageable. They are …. cafepress.com/dianeclancy where right now there are some items with “Conundrum” on them. I also made a shop of http://cafepress.com/fancifulanimals where so far I am selling “Bambi with Butterflies.” It sure has taken me a lot of work to get these things set up and understand how to do it.

And I followed Sue O’Kieffe’s advice and set up a Xanga place xanga.com/DianeClancy. And I did the Facebook that Chris O’Byrne suggested I join. But so far I am totally lost there and at those other big ones … they will have to wait.

But it is kind of exciting that I feel I am making some real progress on figuring how to connect up to go to another level. Thank you again for the help everyone has been here. I hope all is well with each of you.

Yesterday I started a shop at Imagekind …. my shop is DianeClancysArt. There is always so much work to set up something like this. It looks like a good shop (Imagekind) … it is new and it is very reasonably priced. They do matting and framing besides printing prints if someone wants. It is easy enough to start a shop and you can have a basic gallery for free (unless you make less than $5 a year and then they charge you that … something like that). I have one image up – take a guess which one!

This social networking is all a little strange to me. I mentioned that yesterday I started a My Space page … but haven’t put anything (except my icon) on it. So I set up for the You Tube thing too – my You Tube … There is nothing on these things yet … but I have started.

All the marketing advice I am reading talks about using these social networks. I don’t really know what I am doing … but who knows what will happen if I put one foot in front of the other.

And it is time to get back to working on this Fanciful Animal Images website and learn how to do shopping carts and such. At least I can accept both PayPal and I think I signed up for the Google Checkout too.

I’m back … I am now signed up with Google Checkout – I wasn’t before. The amount of small print with all these things is a little overwhelming. But I skim them looking for red flags … and more importantly, hear from people beforehand which are trustworthy. The nice thing about the Google Checkout, until the end of the year, there are no fees for sellers. It is hard when many of these places (like Etsy) have a listing fee, take a percentage and then PayPal takes a percentage too and has a fee. It eats into the profit margin which isn’t that large to begin with.

But I feel guided to keep moving ahead. Thanks for witnessing this process – and thank you for your encouragement … this blogging community has become quite important to me.

I am going through my email box today to try to deal with stuff or file it away. It is boiling hot and sticky. But I am making progress. I just signed up with My Space to be able to download a file on how to effectively use My Space. I can’t figure out much yet, but here is the adress …. I know it will shock you … http://myspace.com/dianeclancy. One step at a time for learning these new things!

I have been working the last couple of days on making the pdf file for the Studio Artist Demo. I naively thought I could just copy and paste it from the post to a pdf file. Many hours later, I know think it is not so simple.

I asked for help on the technical details from the local Hidden-Tech group and the number of responses and suggestions has been amazing! It is a local email (probably offline group too) of people working in small businesses for ourselves. I think almost (if not all) everyone is in the Creative Economy. It is so great the way people help each other. I know when a question whizzes by my eye that I think I can answer, I jump right in there to be part of the solutions. Very cool what we are all doing to help each other in this new interconnected world.

Of course, after I get this ready, then I need to figure out how to use the newsletter function at my host. All the marketing advice talks about giving away something in exchange for someone’s email address. I think I am going to have a nice product to give away.

There was high demand for our new business cards once one person saw them at the doctor’s office today. Very exciting!! This is the first time anyone else has seen them. I had only about 20 in my pocket … and most were gone quickly. They saw the different kinds and several people wanted most of them. The people tended to want the 3 image card instead of the one … so I am glad I had that printed up. Perhaps there will be a new wave of business card collecting!

As part of the AWE (Artists Window Exhibit), we had the opportunity to put more artwork in the downtown windows. One artist fell through and there was a half hour (time) window – so we jumped up and put up 10 pieces between the 2 of us. We had taken down one show this morning and carried it to the third floor, basically turned around (after a phone call), and carried it back out to set it (and some other pieces) back up in a new place.

Fun to see work up. And in each place the same work looks very different. I figure that you never know when some happening will come together from a person seeing our work. And it was so much fun at the doctor’s office hearing people try to prove how much they love our art work. There was an ownership of us as artists that was very exciting! It feels so validating of how we can build our businesses as we figure out how to nurture and expand this feeling.

Here are my current entries for Rima’s challenge. You can see the deatils of the challenge on her blog on this post. You can also see some other people’s entries in the posts after this one. here is the original image to work on. You can see more details on how to use Studio Artist on this post on my blog.

Lily Pad

This painting is done in Studio Artist using warp translate and rotate tools quite a few times.

Then it became time to try a different method. I decided to move to Photoshop and see what to do there … I actually made “Night Light Lily” before I made this painting. This is an exclusion layer over the Night Light Lily. I copied the layer several times and the top layer is exclusion mode is on the top.

Looking down on London Square with all the traffic whizzing by … You can see the theaters off to one side, and all the traffic swirling around. What do you think and feel about this digital painting ~ or any of the other topics we have been discussing … or raise a new topic.

I have been very busy with the local Artists Group of Franklin County as we prepare for our next AWE – Artists Window Exhibit. My window has been taken down since that business wanted only a short exhibit. Hopefully, Susan will find some more windows so I can get my work up too.

The talk around town is that even this couple of weeks with the work of some artists in a handful of store windows has picked up the mood of the town. There is a lot of evidence that building the creative economy helps build the whole economy.

Susan has posted tonight on her blog! I wonder where Soul Fish has disappeared to? I think a lot of regular commenters must be on summer vacation. I hope it is that and not that I have gotten way too boring.

The business cards arrived! They look good.Â I am so pleased that I printed the one with the 3 images also – I actually much prefer it to the other.Â I love it – for me the sizes of the images are just fine.Â But all 4 came today – a day early.

This is the Studio Artist demo that some of you have been asking me to create. This is a 22 step creation of a digital painting in Studio Artist to show you a demonstration of how to use this innovative art program. I have decided to use the same size images I usually use. I want to give you a better flow than I think you will get from going back and forth between thumbnails and enlargements. But for the workspace and the final image I am providing the thumbnails so you can look at the enlargement if you want. Of course any of the other enlargements are available on request.

This is what the workspace looks like. Here is a screen shot of the program after I have already done some steps so you can see which part of the workspace is the source image and which is the canvas. Studio Artist always has a source image, but there are many ways to use this source image including use of the colors, the image to manipulate and not at all.

Workspace

I am putting in a thumbnail that you can look at full size in case you want to see more of a closeup of the controls of the program. This is the identical image but it will blow up larger.

I use the acrylic painting â€œFire and Airâ€ (that I have been using for the series of digital paintings in posts the last couple of weeks) for the source image. I bring the source image onto the canvas to start this creative process. In other words, I tell the program to place this image on to the working canvas so that I may begin to manipulate this image.

Then using the â€œinteractive warp” operation with the â€œtranslateâ€ tool (as opposed to the “translate local” tool), I grab the curvaceous yellow curve in the upper right hand corner and pull the image a little down and to the left. You can see the reflecting, both vertically and horizontally, of the yellow curve. If I had dragged in only one direction, it would have reflected in only that direction.

Using the same tool I again grab the upper right hand corner with the yellow curves and drag them a little to the left and substantially down. Notice that the doubled curve doubled again. If I had originally kept dragging, it would not have doubled again. Each time I stop, the whole operation starts anew with the new resulting image. Notice the way we have pretty much lost the green. But the striped reefs (I think someone called them) have also expanded and doubled.

Looks like I then repeat the process â€¦ I couldnâ€™t duplicate it. There are many subtle decisions â€“ just like in traditional painting â€“ that are hard to exactly duplicate. (At least for me.) Fortuitous happenings happen here too.

I translate this image again moving to the right and upward, this time to try to bring more of the stripped reef back in. The yellow curves got a little dominating so I wanted to bring back more contrast. In the process the little pieces of the reef at the top and bottom left get more substance.

Using the interactive warp operation with the â€œrotateâ€ tool (as opposed to the â€œrotate local,â€ â€œrotate scale,â€ or â€œrotate3symmetryâ€ tools), I grab the reef and work to keep it prominent but at a tilt.

Then I rotate it again to give it more tilt since many of you like that off-symmetry. Now we move to a different kind of technique. The new base canvas has basically been set up for more of a dissimilar kind of movement.

I use the interactive warp operation of â€œsphereâ€ (as opposed to â€œsphere1â€ or â€œsphere2â€). If you look to the center and then a little up and to the right, you will see this swirl â€¦ or umbrella as it has been called. This is where doing a video would be very effective.

All these tools are â€œinteractiveâ€ â€“ you can use them and create and see changes in real time. These spheres are something else though â€“ they are gorgeous in the way they move and ebb and flow, right before your very eyes. But if I stop to take a screen shot, then I cannot get back the same image. It is extremely interactive â€“ it is not sequential, but live time!

For the next few shots I go in for close-ups to try to give the feel of the fluidity. We are working near the center, near the first sphere. This tool of the interactive warp operation is â€œsphere2.â€ I make a move with the tool, take a screen shot and repeat the process a couple of times to show you the movement.

Going back to the top of this painting, I use the interactive warp operation with the sphere1 tool to create another movement there on the left. With all of these sphere tools, there is an incredible amount of interactivity while using these tools. I wouldnâ€™t call it a lot of control, but certainly a lot of choice and possibility!

I rotate the whole image again a little to the left and up to get more movement in the painting. It breaks up the upper right hand corner that I think was a little too static and adds some interest to the bottom left corner.

I decide another umbrella is needed near the bottom right corner. This is sphere2 that creates the â€œeyeâ€ looking spheres. The sphere tool creates translucent looking spheres and sphere2 creates more circular, more regular spheres.

One last umbrella is created above and slightly to the right of the last umbrella. It is odd – things start out as shapes for me and then become specific things as I keep playing with a painting. This happens in both traditional and digital medium paintings.

OK – now that we have created this painting, we still have to name it. Some ideas I have are Streetscape I (because surely there will be more like this), Umbrellas in the Rain, Looking Down from Floor 25, Theater Square … do you have any to add?

Using this program is like using any creative tool. Each little step can look obvious and manageable, but each step involves choice and techniques. If you start with the same tools, similar ideas, the same source image, you will get a different result than I will. This is because we each bring all our vision and experience to bear on each decision we make – including the artistic ones.